Triumph of the Retart is a Daria fanfic by Peter Guerin, featuring small crossovers with Beavis And Butthead and King of the Hill. It is also the last story in Guerin's Lawndale Militia timeline, which he later abandoned for a series of script-format "Daria OVAs" in another continuity. Triumph Of The Retart, unlike the other two stories in this series, features no (intentional) supernatural elements or constant anime references, and largely tones down the Mega Crossover to just shows already created by Mike Judge in roughly the same canon. However, none of this stops it from being completely insane.

The story concerns itself with Daria Morgendorffer's new school year at Lawndale High, where she conveniently learns on her walk to school that Lawndale High severely mistreats its special ed students to the point of segregating them into a rundown wing of the school and leaving them open to rampant, unmonitored bullying. Enter Jane Lane's new neighbor David MacAllister, a boy with curly brown hair who does not in any way resemblethe author himself. David, mere seconds from entering the school, is mercilessly assaulted by the JJJs, Jeffy, Jamie and Joey. Daria rescues him, which immediately leads to David French Kissing her, and love blossoms from this darling sexual assault. After being punished by Ms. Li in the aftermath of the fight and upset with the state of special ed students in the school, David decides to run for Student Government President. Sandi Griffin, er, Del Monaco, immediately declares her candidacy entirely to prevent the betterment of special ed students, and the entire school is swept up in David and Sandi's battle for supremacy.

Naturally, this promptly escalates into Sandi arranging for football thugs to beat the hell out of people, hiring Todd Ianuzzi to be a hit man against David (oh, and did we mention Todd raped Daria as a kid?), Trent enlisting the aid of Rage Against the Machine to rally to David's cause, Quinn Morgendorffer constantly getting her shirt torn open by her foes, a minister singing show tunes, Daria and David engaging in graphic Author Appeal sex, and the whole story culminating in David's murder by a completely random suicide bomber. Then, finally, we get a complete reversion to status quo, and the events of the story are largely forgotten.

Oh, and nobody EVER learns how to spell the word "retard."

The story went over about as well as Guerin's other stories, and like the others, it received a MST from the same crew that riffed his other efforts. Though this story was written between the other two Lawndale Militia stories, the MST was released as the last one, leading to some confusion as to the correct chonology. Later Guerin fanfics completely ignored the chain of events, creating further confusion in Guerin's fanfic universe.

Tropes:

All Elections Are Serious Business: Lawndale High has the most bizarrely complicated student bureaucracy in the world. It apparently has a house and senate, policy committees, and a student government president that has the ability to legislate school policy. And everyone in the school is completely obsessed with every part of the race. And that's not even getting into how ridiculously over the top Sandy gets in ensuring she wins.

All Just a Dream: The story opens with Daria on a beach with Trent where Quinn is nearly eaten by a shark. Quinn punching Daria in the face reveals the entire sequence to be a dream.

Attempted Rape: Todd decides to try and rape Daria...right as he is in the same building with a bunch of people trying to kill him.

Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Notably averted in spite of the fact that David is actually described as having ADHD. On the other hand, in the story itself, David doesn't appear to display any of the actual recognized symptoms of ADHD.

Author Avatar: David MacAllister is a dead-ringer for Peter. Not shockingly, David gets to romance and claim the virginity of Daria. Throughout the story it's often unclear when David is speaking as a character and when David is speaking as Peter's representation of himself.

Author Tract: The story is largely Peter Guerin's attempt to deal with his own childhood as a special ed student. The stories ends on a "plea for tolerance" that re-iterates the story's relevance to his own life.

A Bloody Mess: One of the football players who assaults David rigs a bag of ketchup in order to fake a serious injury. Apparently, nobody in Lawndale can tell the difference between blood and ketchup, and they don't discover the ruse until they actually start to prep the guy for surgery.

Computer Virus: Brittany's brother Zed, a grade-schooler, is capable of creating a virus overnight that not only deletes all data on the website it is "e-mailed" to, but also all data on the hard drive and causes the computer to explode.

Hey. remember that episode where Brittany stole Daria's lab mouse and gave it to her little brother? Because Peter sure does! And he will not stop telling us! The episode is "The Lab Brat." Amazingly, he never brings this up.

Hey, did you know that Quinn stayed at Jane's house when Daria and her family were visiting a prep school!? Because if characters aren't complaining about the lab rat, they're reminding Quinn about the events of "Gifted."

For some reason nobody ever calls anyone on the phone in this story. They just run over to the other person's house, costing precious time that could have been saved by the use of a device invented in the 1800s.

Also, after David has already survived several beatings and an assassination attempt, he still goes off alone with a stranger, despite Daria's warning. A few seconds later, KABOOM! David is literally Too Dumb to Live.

IKEA Erotica: As noted in the MS Ting, the uncensored version of the sex scene is less "titillating" and more "Peter copying the most clinical description of sexual intercourse imaginable out of a high school biology text book."

Mike Nelson: (I)t's not even provocative - it's about as sexy as a user's manual from an '84 Ford LTD!!!

In Memoriam: The story is dedicated to a friend of Guerin's who died of a congenital heart defect. The MST leaves this dedication unmocked.

Loads and Loads of Characters: While not to the same extent of the other two stories in this series, the cast of characters still gets wildly out of hand rather early in the story.

Miranda Rights: The police who arrest Sandi read a rather strange version of this to her.

Rape as Drama: In this fanfic, Daria was kidnapped and molested by Todd as a child. Since Todd got off on a technicality, her entire reason for acting and dressing the way she does is because she lives in fear of being raped again.

Rescue Romance: Daria and David meet when she rescues him from bullies. He is immediately so smitten with her that he flirts with her and jams his tongue down her throat mere moments later. This is true love apparently. Also, Trent and Daria's romance never comes up in spite of Peter clearly being on the Trent/Daria ship in Guerin's other stories.

Reset Button Ending: The fanfic ends with a short epilogue that reverts the regular cast back to where they started while handwaving the major implications of the events that they just engaged in.

Sadist Teacher: In this story, Ms. Li goes out of her way to try and ruin David's life. When she is not stymied by the fact that what she does is blatantly illegal.

Status Quo Is God: The story pretty much smacks the reset button at the end, but this is particularly grating in the case of Quinn. Quinn has, in the course of the story, suffered two sexual assaults, been removed from the fashion club for not only having Daria as a sister (something Sandi verified) but also for ratting out the Fashion Club's attempted murders, taken a bullet for David, and marched with the Special Ed students during David's funeral procession and told Sandi directly that she despises being with bigots like her. One scene later and Quinn is back in the Fashion Club after convincing them Daria played a joke and she's back to being the same air-headed kid as always.

Oh, and Sandi by this point has not only hired a hitman to murder a fellow student, tried to kill said student in front of hundreds of witnesses when that failed, tried to shoot a police officer during her arrest, and may even have even arranged for the suicide bombing that killed David (thus two more murders). She is immediately back in school with no repercussions.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy